If you missed the intro in Part 1, read it here.

Let’s Get Started
Your first assignment is to take the first step toward understanding “what’s out there?” I urge you to not be offended by any of my recommendations, nor to skip this step. Many of you already know your way around the Internet, and if that’s you, approach this as though you’re taking a vacation in your hometown: See things you’ve already seen with fresh eyes and an eager mind. Adopt the Shoshin, or Beginner’s Mind, of Zen Buddhism. Here’s the homework:

1. If you don’t already have one, set up a Facebook account. Fill out your profile with your interests – books, music, movies, activities. Fill in a bit of info about your education and work history. Don’t skip these things, they’re key to understanding the experience.
2. Visit your Facebook page once a day to try out at least one of the following things:
   • Write a status message. Don’t overthink it, you’re just dipping your toe in the pool. Talk about something you read, saw, or did that was interesting to you, and see what kind of conversation ensues.
   • Click on Friends in the left column, and use one of the options to add some friends.
   • Keep an eye on the right column under Sponsored for ads that interest you. Click a few.
   • Click on the photo or name of one of your friends. Look over their page, check out their photos, and write something on their Wall.
3. Set up Google Alerts. Set up alerts for your name, your business name, and three or four topics that interest you (sports, music, film, current events, for example). Choose the Everything, Once a Day, and Only Best Results options. You can easily adjust these settings if you’re getting too much or too little.
4. Do you have an iPhone or Android phone? Get a Foursquare account and download the application to your phone. Check in at all the restaurants, coffee shops, stores, and other destinations you visit over the next couple of weeks. See what happens.
5. The next few times you do an Internet search, try one of the other search engines. If you usually use Google, use Bing. If you’re a Yahoo regular, try Google. If you have time, try the same search on more than one engine. Each time, take a moment to skim over everything on the search results page: the header, the sidebars, the footer, search results, ads, and tools alike.

Mark Your Calendar to Check Back In
If you’re already an RSS cognoscenti, subscribe to my blog so you’ll know when I post the next part of this series. Bring your notes. In the meantime, have fun, explore, and start loading up the comments section with your questions and ideas. What have I missed already? What’s keeping you up at night?

Through the 80s and 90s, when I worked in traditional advertising agencies – first as a copywriter, then creative director and occasional producer/director – I didn’t think of what I was doing as “traditional.” You probably didn’t either, because there was nothing to compare to, nothing to be more “traditional” than.

Then the Internet came rocketing into our lives, and suddenly (excuse the hyperbole, but in hindsight, it sure seems like it was sudden) we and everyone we knew were on the Internet 24/7. Not quite as suddenly, but fast enough to knock us off our balance, all of the work that most of us had produced prior to the year 2000 or so (TV, radio, print, outdoor, direct mail, public relations) was being lumped into the category of “traditional” advertising. And for an industry built on a heaping helping of creativity, being labeled “traditional” carries a sting.

So, first, let me encourage you to unclench your teeth and take a deep breath. “Traditional” isn’t bad. It’s not a putdown. Prior to 2000, it’s where the eyeballs were. And a lot of eyeballs still are on TV, and print, and outdoor, so those traditional media are still plenty relevant. Traditional is simply a convenient way of labeling stuff that happens OFF the Internet, to distinguish it from stuff that happens ON the Internet. Some people use the term “offline,” but I think that sounds awkward and unconnected, which is worse. So for me, traditional advertising works just fine.

Nevertheless, I’ll assume you’re reading this because you recognize two critical business opportunities: A lot of consumers (your customers’ customers) are spending a lot of time on the Internet, and your customers are looking for help reaching them there. So you’re getting those calls more and more frequently: “Can you help us sort out this social media thing?”and “We want our website to do more for our business” and “Do we need a blog or a Facebook page?”

And you’re freaking out
I know you are. I talk to agency owners and creative directors and account managers every week who say the same thing: “We need to get our head around this online thing. There’s so much to learn, we don’t know where to start. And our clients aren’t going to wait around for us.” They have panic in their eyes. And I sympathize, because just a few years ago I was a traditional agency creative director who, together with the owner of the agency, decided we should get our heads around this online thing. I’ve been where you are. I can help.

In this series, I’m going to lead you, logical step by step, through evolving your traditional agency toward better serving your customers and toward taking full advantage of the opportunities that online marketing presents, both in expanded marketing presence for your customers and in revenue for your agency. By the end of this series, you’ll have a roadmap for navigating your way through the unfamiliar territory of online marketing. Here’s a peek at where we’re going to go:

What’s Out There? What’s happening in online marketing? Where are the opportunities? I’ll point out the key components, and I’ll share approaches and resources for keeping up on the ever-evolving landscape of online media.

What Do You Want To Be? Is your goal to add full-service online marketing capabilities? Or would the smarter tactic be to add niche services? We’ll work through a planning exercise.

What Do You Need To Get There? What knowledge and resources do you have now? What do you lack? This installment will help you create a “shopping list” of ingredients for your agency evolution.

Where Can You Get What You Need? I’ll share resources for bolstering your knowledge, finding good mentors and advisors, and shoring up your team with key players.

In Part 2, I give you some homework to start getting yourself acclimated to the online world.

Just tweeting a thank you is not enough, so first I want to share some effusive thanks and praise for Bret Giles, Lacey Brown, and the fantastic Agencyside crew for putting on an outstanding BOLO conference. This was my second year in attendance, and everything about the conference jumped up a notch from last year’s excellent event. If you’re an agency (or something that walks and quacks  like an agency: design shop, consultant, marketing guru, etc) and you’re not already an Agencyside member and a regular attendee at BOLO, make sure you get in on this goodness.

What was awesome about BOLO:

• The speakers. Dozens of smart, engaging, and informative experts sharing their insights about critical topics in online marketing.
• The location. Scottsdale’s Valley Ho is a masterful modernization of a deliciously retro landmark.
• The weather. One of the two reasons I wouldn’t go home until 1 a.m. any of the three nights of the conference. Sitting on the patio and drinking cocktails on a late October evening is Scottsdale’s gift to the world. The other reason I wouldn’t go home until 1 a.m.:
• The people. Every year I’ve attended BOLO I’ve met bright, funny, interesting people from around the world who are earnestly solving the challenges of digital marketing…and consuming cocktails.
• The sponsors. At a lot of events, the sponsors are invisible, or get a couple minutes on stage. BOLO’s sponsors are there in the sessions, at a rapidfire “speed dating” card exchange, and of course rubbing elbows over the cocktails and great food that these sponsors generously paid for.
• Vaudeville 2.0. The conference wrapped up with an entertaining event that featured 5-minute, 20-slide presentations from a batch of hilarious and smart and, in some cases, inebriated conference attendees. This unique capper had many of us ROFL.

There’s only one heartbreak about BOLO: With the extensive speaker schedule and often 4 breakout sessions running at once, you are constantly faced with crippling decisions about which awesome presentation to attend. I know from the Tweet stream that I missed great ones from Brandon Willey, Josh Yeager, Kristina Halvorson, Brian Wong, Kimberly Koehly, and Michael Gass. And probably many others, too.

I did, however, attend these awesome breakouts and keynotes, and I highly recommend you check out the videos and slides on the Agencyside site (I assume it will take a few days to get all this great stuff up there…be patient):

• Tim Ash of SiteTuners showed us how some often simple changes to a website’s landing pages can make a huge difference in conversion. His Four Pillars of Trust are going on a sticky note on the bulletin board above my computer, for reference whenever I work on a site. You might also want to grab his book, Landing Page Optimization. I did.
• Jay Baer of Convince & Convert rolled out some of the principles from his forthcoming book, The NOW Revolution, including the 7 key roles that agencies need to fill for their clients. If you’ve never seen Jay speak, check out his website, find out where he’s going to be, and book a ticket.
• Tom Martin of Converse Digital laid out his Trojan horse strategy of using social media tactics to get a foot in the door of big brands who won’t otherwise take your call. His flagship example was his work using social media to reposition Mardi Gras as a family-friendly event, which led to meetings, proposals, and projects with Tabasco, Embassy Suites, and other big hitters.
• Susan Baier of Audience Audit rocked her audience with, believe it or not, the sexiness of data. Her Quantitative Attitudinal Audience Segmentation eschews the not very useful consumer attributes like age, sex, and household income and gets to the really useful “why” of consumer behavior. This is the kind of data that even embittered agency creatives start to drool over.

I said there was only one heartbreak about BOLO, but I lied. There are two. The other is waking up (and sobering up) and realizing that it’s over for another year.

Thanks to all the awesome people who put it on, and to all the cool friends, old and new, who shared these few exceptional Fall days with me.

What was your BOLO highlight?

PS Be sure to check out my post on handling post-conference overload.

Are you attending the BOLO Conference in Scottsdale next week? I went last year, had a great time, met a lot of interesting people, and learned a bunch about the business of online marketing. The conference is put on by my super-smart friends at Agencyside. If you’re going, and especially if you’re from out of town, download my BOLO Conference Guide. It’s full of my tips on restaurants, spots for cocktails, the weather, navigating the airport, and choosing ground transportation. This is essential pre-conference reading, and be sure to keep it handy once you arrive in Scottsdale.

Download your copy of my BOLO Conference Guide, and leave me a comment to tell me how you used it, which of my recommendations you tried and how you rate them, and what I should add or subtract for next year’s guide.

An associate in Northern Arizona pinged me about an odd effect she was seeing in one of her client’s online marketing campaigns. They turned off their PPC campaign for a while and saw a quick and dramatic drop – 50-60% – in traffic from NATURAL search. Not from PPC, which obviously plummeted to zero, but from natural search results. “What gives?” she wanted to know.

Although Google denies any connection between PPC spend and natural search ranking (and I believe them), there is another, less obvious connection between the two: There is ample evidence that searchers are more likely to click a NATURAL search result if there is also a PPC ad on the same page. In their 2007 Search Synergy Report, iCrossing found that clicks increased by more than 90% and actions by 45% when SEO and paid search were combined.

So if you’ve stopped PPC, your leads from natural search ranking could well drop just from that effect.

What’s the takeaway? Maintain an optimized and efficient PPC campaign, maintain your ongoing SEO efforts, including keeping content current on the site and building in-bound links, and focus on site improvements that will turn visitors into customers.

I had a lively discussion with a writer and online marketing guy from a local ad agency over beers last night. (Side note: Wednesday is wings night at Sun Up Brewery, the hot wings are tasty and just the right amount of painful, and the Trooper IPA cools the fire with delicious efficiency.) Our conversation was about sneedobb. Not familiar with sneedobb? It’s pretty amazing stuff, but before we get to sneedobb, you’ll need the backstory:

The agency where my buddy works is running a self-promotion campaign which encourages readers to Google one of a selection of bizarre phrases, whereupon a page from the agency’s website shows up as #1 in the search results. It’s a neat trick, and according to my friend, it wows prospective clients: “Hey, look, you guys rank number one in Google!”

Like many an excellent magic trick, this one depends on sleight of hand. Which is great fun if you’re watching a freaky street magician, but it’s meaningless for search marketing. Why? Because there’s no relevance. And in SEO, relevance is the name of the game.

Unless, Of Course, Sneedobb is the Name of Game

The problem is, this SEO trick only works if you tell people what the search term is. And that’s not how search marketing works. That’s how advertising works, yes. Advertising is a push strategy – you push messages at your audience, such as “Drink our koolaid” or “Drive our car” or “Visit our website.”

But search engine optimization is about making sure your audience finds your website when they’re looking for what they want (not what you’ve told them to look for). In other words, the search term has to have relevance for the searcher. SEO is a pull strategy. The voodoo of SEO is in figuring out what your prospective customers might use as a search term when they’re looking for what you’re selling (really the process requires a bunch of research and marketing insights, but voodoo sounds way sexier) .

And I’ll wager you a rabbit that this ad agency’s prospective customers aren’t searching for “pumas have iridescent feathers.” Or any of the nonsense phrases they’re promoting.

And That’s Where Sneedobb Triumphs

You see, anybody can achieve a high search ranking for an irrelevant term like sneedobb. As a test, we’re going to see how long it takes this post to top the search rankings for sneedobb. Of course, to make this trick easy to do, I stacked the deck: As of today, January 28, 2010, there are no search results for sneedobb.

What, you protest? That’s cheating? Exactly. And it doesn’t matter, because nobody over the age of 11 believes that magic is real. Except, apparently, for some of this local ad agency’s prospective clients.

Update at 1:47 p.m. MST: The results are already in. It took less than three hours for this post to get number one ranking on Google for “sneedobb”. Even I’m surprised by that.

(photo by Hashmil)

If you’re using Wordtracker to do keyword research for search engine optimization, you may find this useful. Wordtracker is a great tool for keyword research, but it does have one puzzling quirk: Wordtracker gives us two indexes – KEI and KEI3 – and they don’t agree.

KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index, and it’s a formula that takes into account how many people are using a keyword (search volume) combined with how much competition there is for that keyword. KEI is great for comparing the likely effectiveness of two keywords you’re evaluating. But what do you do with two KEIs for each keyword? There’s not much info out there – not even from Wordtracker – on how to use Wordtracker’s two different KEIs.

Here’s how I use the two KEIs in Wordtracker. This assumes you want a final working list of 10 keywords:

1. Display your expanded seed keyword list. Click on Get Additional Metrics.
2. Click the KEI header to sort the keywords by KEI. Copy the top 20 (bigger numbers are better with KEI, so make sure you’ve sorted from high KEI to low KEI) and paste them into a spreadsheet or even a text document.
3. Click the KEI3 header to sort by that index. Again, copy the top 20 and paste them into your spreadsheet.
4. Compare your two lists, and pick the top 10 that appear on both lists.

Remember that KEI is just one way to start comparing and selecting keywords. The only real test of search engine optimization efforts is the results you get after you optimize your site and track the search-referred site visits over time.

By the way, I’m often asked “What is a good KEI number?” I recommend you use KEI as a tool for comparing two keywords, but don’t worry too much about the actual KEI number.

I’ve been playing around with the new Facebook privacy settings, and was quite surprised to see how much was NOT private any longer. I’ll admit I was a little careless when I accepted Facebook’s suggested new privacy settings yesterday, but I imagine a lot of you will have been, too. Want to see what your Facebook page now looks like to anyone in the world? I suggest you do this check right away and make any adjustments you need to:

Unfortunately (for this test), you have to be logged in to Facebook to look at profiles, so you can’t just log out and look at your profile. Instead, go to your profile page, then select Settings (mine’s in the upper right corner menu), Privacy Settings, then Profile Information. Click the Preview My Profile… button in the upper right. Prepare to be startled. I was.

Now, you probably want to do something about all that personal information that has just become visible to the entire world. Click the Back to Privacy Settings button. Select each of your privacy settings and set them to your preferred visibility level (you may have to enter your Facebook password the first time to unlock them). I suggest you set them all to Only Friends. The only one I left visible to everyone was Education and Work, as that information is already pretty public and could help with networking. You can see my final selections in the image below.

There’s no Save button; your changes are immediate. You can Preview again just to make sure.

Let me know if you have a compelling argument for leaving more of the settings more visible.

October 20, 2010 NOTE: I wrote this post after last year’s BOLO, but it’s still plenty relevant as I sit down to go through pages of notes and a thick pile of business cards. Links and tags updated.

I just got back to my office after the excellent BOLO2010 conference here in Phoenix. (My sympathy to all the great peeps I met there who are still sitting at the airport or on a 5- or 6-hour flight home.) Like so many people I spoke to at the conference, I now have a stack of materials, a pad full of notes, and an exploded brain. What to do with all this stuff? What to do first?

Here’s my plan, laid out as a general approach that could be used after any conference.

1. Connect – No doubt you traded business cards throughout the conference. I like to jot notes on each card I receive about my conversation with that person. So your first step is to connect online with all of those people. Send LinkedIn invitations to everyone you met (choose the Friend option for “how do you know this person?”, there’s no verification required for that one). Search for and follow them on Twitter. Depending on your Facebook strategy, friend them there. Wherever you’re connecting, include a personal note about your conference conversations to refresh their memory and “make you human.”
2. Communicate – I hope you were tweeting and blogging throughout the conference, but it’s not too late to start. Shoot out some informative posts about what you learned, who you met, who impressed you. Link to other people, blogs, and websites. Use the conference hashtag (for BOLO, it’s #BOLO2010.) Don’t overdo it, make sure it’s relevant, be useful. Don’t forget to thank the people who worked so hard to put on the conference.
3. Research – Get one sheet of paper and a pen. Go through your notes and materials and list the most important things you want to learn more about – websites to check out, white papers to download, tools to sign up for free trials, questions or terms to clarify with a Google search. (I mark them with stars or exclamation marks or question marks while I’m taking notes so I can find them quickly later.) Only grab the ones that really jump out at you, and keep it to less than that one sheet.Now rank them. I use a simple, two-criteria scale: How easy is this from 1 – 3 (where 3 is super easy) and what’s the potential impact from 1 – 3 (where 3 is super impactful)? Multiply the two numbers for each item, and you have a quick guide to where to start: Do 9s first, then 8s, and so on.
4. Plan – Research done? Grab another sheet of paper, and list the action items. Don’t edit, just go through your thoughts, your notes, and your materials and list each thing you took away from the conference that you want to implement. Then apply the same two-criteria scale from above to rank your desired actions.
5. Act – Delegate what you can, and begin to implement your list. Seize the day.

Sure, there’s plenty more to do, but this is just to get you started, just to get you out from under the crippling information overload and analysis paralysis.

What are you doing to get the wheels turning after BOLO2010?

I’m attending the BOLO Conference in Scottsdale next week, put on by my friends at Agencyside. If you’re going, and especially if you’re from out of town, download my BOLO Conference Planner. There are so many great workshops, labs, and breakouts at BOLO that I think you’ll find it useful in picking your sessions from among the competing options. This is especially important for the Hands-On Workshops on Tuesday, which require advance registration – now! – and which will only accept 15 participants. I’ve also included info on the weather, navigating the airport, and choosing ground transportation, and my personal tips on restaurants and nightlife. Grab your copy of my BOLO Conference planner, and I’ll see you at BOLO!